Easter and Gender: On Men Dancing with Men

We have a video of last night’s Easter Monday event in Cisternino. Local music was performed by local musicians, and local people danced local dances – quick footwork, stiff upper bodies – young and old, men with women, women with women, men with men. (I just found out you can’t put up a video on this blog, so I put the video on my Facebook page.)

Men dancing with men and women with women – does this mean that southern Italy is jollily unstressed about gender? Not necessarily.

Easter, like Pesah (Easter is Pasqua in Italian), is a festival of spring. Spring is the time of renewal, and renewal for our species means fertility and sex. Everyone knows, though not everyone tells the kids, that Easter eggs, like Easter bunnies, are about where babies come from.

Catholic ritual often unashamedly takes its impetus from a pagan foundation, like fire feeds on a bed of burned but unspent amber. Easter Monday is a fertility festival in all but name. The symbolism focuses on not only sex but also gender (to stick to a now old-fashioned distinction: sex is biological and gender social). And when it comes to gender it is hardly progressive. Frankly, some Easter rituals are a thinly disguised insult to women.

Here in parts of Puglia, people hang effigies of grotesque old women on lamp posts and balconies. Then on Easter Monday they blow them up, creating a fire works attended by crowds. No one seems to even recognize the sexism and ageism of the message: old women are useless to procreation.

It’s all really about making men more male and women more female, whatever that means in nature and culture. In Cisternino, men and women take different pastries to a nearby pilgrimage site, a twelfth century church built on the site of a pagan fertility temple. The men’s pastry is a bag with two eggs in it, the women’s a doll with one egg in the womb.

Difference, I believe, is also behind the tradition of men and women dancing separately. It may seem to outsiders as liberated gender relations, a lack of homophobia, but it isn’t.

Or better, it wasn’t. Nowadays, perhaps it is a bit of political statement, at least for the young people dancing. They search a renewal based in tradition. Like, one hopes, the new guy in the Vatican does, too.

Passover (Kind of) Returns to Puglia

There are no Jews here. So when after a long search I located Diane in the enormous Conad hypermarket, she was beaming. We found matzah! The cover of the matzah box informs the Italian public that unleavened bread comes from the Jewish tradition, but the focus is on its health benefits. Like in Slovakia, where new owners peddle the matzah baked in my grandfather’s factory not to observant Jews but to sick Gentiles.

At home we had intended to pack our Haggadah texts, but had forgotten them. No problem, I found an electronic version and we passed the tablet around as we were reading. I was reminded of my parents’ home. Intimidated by antisemitic governments, they had stopped doing Passover and almost forgot how to celebrate it. Once in the States we struggled to resuscitate a seder, from my Dad’s broken memories and with the aid of an American haggadah (whose point, incidentally, seemed to be that Passover was about democracy and the Declaration of Independence). A Jewish family that argues together stays together, and the bickering was usually more intense on this night than on any other night. It concerned every step in the ceremony. Are you allowed to eat off the seder plate? Why is there an egg on it? Why have we not drunk the second cup of wine yet? Can’t we eat already?

These were our questions this seder, too. Daniel warmed our hearts as he chanted the youngest son’s traditional Four Questions. After the second cup of wine, we drove the serpentine road to Cisternino, for a fantastic meal at Bell’Italia. I had a lamb cutlet, avoiding bread, beans, rice, or pork. We came back and finished the seder, including the two cups that still remained, and all the songs. A nice family celebration.

The Italian South was once home to important Jewish communities, but they got kicked out in bloody riots in the 1500’s. The Spanish rulers of the area were perhaps following the pattern they had established back home. So it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that we had just performed the first seder in five hundred years in this central region of Puglia.

The Prophet Eliahu, who will announce the Redeemer, once again did not come this year. I hope it’s not because the glass of Negroamaro that we set aside for him was not kosher. I feel a bit guilty, but anyway I am going to drink it now.

Škoda Italia

In cca. 1960 my father would press the pedal of our Škoda MB1000 hard into the floor every time we struggled up the foothills of the Tatra Mountains. It was a good car, worth the years of waiting until the state allowed us to buy it. True, here and there the Czech-made car would stall all of a sudden. Then we’d all get out to help Dad crank the engine, with a twisted rod that fit into a hole under the hood in the front. No more trouble than restarting a stuck computer these days. And as far as I remember our car always made it up the hill in the end, unlike the Škodas that my cousin Peter remembers from the nineties, just after the Fall of the Wall. Then Czechs and Slovaks, the hungriest for travel of all the Eastern Bloc citizens, were let loose from what the communist leaders called the “socialist camp.” Peter, who was driving his family on a wide-eyed trip to Switzerland, recalls Škodas littering the shoulders of Alpine highways, unable to chug it all the way to the top.

It’s not that no Škodas filtered across the Iron Curtain. Some were sold to low-income drivers and communists in capitalist countries. So when we drove one to freedom in 1965, we had no trouble selling it in Italy, our temporary home. We were relieved to get rid of it, and were looking forward to America and our first huge Chevrolet.

I was therefore at first taken aback when, instead of the Fiat we had reserved, we were offered an “upgrade” to a bigger Škoda. We wanted an Italian car. But a Škoda? Will it make it up the hill? Will we have to crank up the engine?

As it turns out, the Škoda Rapid has been working very well. It is perky, accelerates quickly, has great torque, consumes very little Diesel, and even the stereo system seems excellent. It’s not the same Škoda, and it’s not the same Europe. The Škoda concern is an international company dominated by Volkswagen. The Czech work force is, I heard it rumored, supplemented by migrants from the further and poorer East. So our rental vehicle is actually a German car made in the Czech Republic by Romanians for Italians. Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Romanians all bitch about this kind of thing. They diss the European Union that has stopped them from being at each others’ throats and is, in spite of its deep flaws, a model of peaceful and prosperous coexistence for the world.

But I could not be happier about the national hybridity of my vehicle, as I navigate the twisting curves of the Strada Provinciale 17 in my Škoda Italia, learning to keep up with the natives’ speed. Viva Europa, I say to myself as I end up at the top of a hill squeezed between two rows of parked Audis and Fiats. I am facing an unexpected round white sign with a red rim: meaning do not enter. I don’t know how I’ll ever get out of this bind, but I know I will. Viva Europa, I say, as only a Jewish Slovak-Hungarian, Czech-Canadian who does not live in Europe can.

 

Diane and the Škoda Rapid in front of our trullo.

Cittàslow

Cisternino is this year’s pick of the cittàslow movement. It’s pronounced cheetah slow (okay, the accent is on the “tah” of “cheetah”). There are more contradictions in the movement’s name than using the fastest land animal to advertise low speed. “Cittàslow” is actually an organization that originated in Italy, even if it is now world-wide, originally in protest about McDonald’s moving into the country of Buonarotti, Pavarotti, and agnelotti. Yet they let the imperial language creep into their own lingo.

May be the people who chose the sobriquet “cittàslow” are a bit slow when it comes to naming things. But I don’t think so: intelligent people can be homophonically challenged; just think of the committee that named the Canadian Opera Company, COC.

Probably the point is that Cittàslow – Slow City, is not against global influences as such, and not even against the invasive power of English. Rather, it is against doing it too quickly, before the local and the little can adapt to the global and the great. The movement has stringent criteria for membership. Among other things, any city that is accepted must have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, safeguard its cultural distinctiveness, and sponsor eco-friendly development.

It certainly does not get any slower than Cisternino, a small town in the North of the southern province of Puglia. A charming white-washed “centro historico,” with a maze of streets reminiscent of a North African casbah, perches on a cliff with a broad view of the Itria Valley and its Negroamaro vines, surrounded by a rather nondescript uptown of blocky tenements. This afternoon during sleepy time (2 to 5 pm), there seemed to be about three cars chugging along the almost totally empty streets. One of the few people out was a befuddled African trinket seller, who had followed someone’s awful advice to come to these deserted confines to ply his sunglasses and iPad covers. The one caffe that is always open was so today as well, serving four foreigners unslow enough to be up and about. There should have been a cat or a dog on the street, but they were probably all asleep.